The rise and rise of the Internet and the digital economy that it enabled had a profound and as yet not fully mapped out impact on our understanding of law and the limits of regulation. Its borderless nature (seemingly) undermined the central regulatory role that the nation-state had since early modernity. The disintermediation that it facilitated subverted existing hierarchies and disrupted well-established business models. We see this tension when the EU tries to subject Google to its data protection regime, when Uber and the sharing economy get into conflict with regulation aimed at traditional services or when peer-to peer file servers call into question the business model of the film industry, especially the practice to release films for specific geographic areas at a time. Information technology did, however, not only create novel legal problems; it also created novel ways of finding out about them. Historically, the World Wide Web was conceived as a communication tool between research institutions worldwide, and without any doubt cross-border, collaborative research benefited greatly from the sharing of data and ideas that the new technology facilitated. Academic knowledge production changed dramatically as a consequence. The ethos of the academy had always been one of disinterested search for the truth. The open sharing of results and ideas, the cooperation across national borders in pursuit of universal truths and allegiance to one’s discipline rather than country, creed or race come naturally to such a world view. The new technology proved an ideal environment for such an ethos to flourish, often to the dismay of national governments which did not appreciate their researchers sharing such sensitive knowledge as, e.g., optimal encryption methods with the entire globe. While the eventual pushback was significant, it cannot be doubted that the mode of academic knowledge production changes dramatically through the WWW, making research more open, less parochial and more truly international.